AES microdata for scientific purposes: how to obtain them? Description of dataset
The Adult Education Survey (AES) is part of the EU Statistics on lifelong learning. The surveys have been carried out by 29 countries in the EU, EFTA and candidate countries between 2005 and 2008. The AES is a pilot exercise, which for the first time proposed a common EU framework including a standard questionnaire, tools and quality reporting. The reference year is set at 2007.
The survey covers participation in education and lifelong learning activities (formal, non-formal and informal learning). All definitions apply to all persons aged 25-64, living in private households.
The anonymised microdata can be accessed via a first CD-Rom covering 24 out of the 29 countries: Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Germany, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Sweden, Slovak Republic, United Kingdom, Belgium, Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Norway and Croatia (the data from France are provisional). The total net sample size for the first 24 countries is about 170,000. The CD-Rom will be updated with data from the rest of the countries by December 2010. Ireland, Iceland and Luxembourg did not take part in the pilot survey. The Maltese data will not be available on the CD-Rom, as Malta preferred not to participate in this excercise.
Adult Education Surveys are planned to be conducted every 5 years (see Regulation (EC) N° 452/2008 of the European Parliament and of the European Council of 23/4/2008 concerning the production and development of statistics on education and lifelong learning, domain 2).
The classification of education, occupation and economic activities in the AES are fully harmonised with the classifications used in other fields of the European Statistical System. The classification of education activities is based on ISCED, the one of occupation on ISCO and the one of economic activities is in accordance with NACE Rev.1.1.
AES based data
The Adult Education Survey is one of the data sources under the education and lifelong learning domain. Existing sources of data on lifelong learning include the EU Labour Force Survey and the Continuous Vocational Training Survey (enterprise survey). Data from these sources are also available on Eurostat's website.
